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Authors: Matthew Chapman

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Trials of the Monkey (24 page)

BOOK: Trials of the Monkey
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‘I had to go up the mountain,’ Emerson repeats with a distant expression. ‘Missed a night’s work, but it’s okay, you’re a good guy.’
I offer again to pay.
‘I wouldn’t take your money. Went up the mountain, missed a night’s work, but I wouldn’t take your money, no sir.’
I buy everyone a drink. One of the rednecks, Mike, the toughest looking of them all, and buzzing with inebriation, asks me what I’m doing in Dayton. I tell him I’m writing a book about the Scopes Trial.
‘Shee-it,’ he says. ‘Drink that moonshine.’
‘Here?’
‘No, man,’ he says irritably, as if I should know the etiquette of moonshine consumption, ‘take it to the fucking john.’
I do. I drink. To my surprise, it’s excellent. I have friends in New York who’ll spend a hundred bucks for a spindly bottle of grappa. This moonshine is better than any grappa I ever drank. It’s smooth and interesting with a faint, leady, car-radiator aftertaste. And it’s strong. I sit down and take another sip. Even before the liquid touches my lips, the fumes rise up my nose and make my eyes water.
Why am I surprised it’s so good? I remember a junky friend of mine responding to an anti-heroin campaign on TV by saying, ‘Of course, the one thing they don’t tell you is it
feels great.
Why else would so many people do it? If they’d just acknowledge that one fact up front, they might get somewhere. Instead they give you half the truth and leave you to find the rest out for yourself.’
I recap the contraband and go back out into the bar.
The mood is different tonight, a slight hint of violence under the raucous good humour. I keep going off the radar. A man I was talking to a minute ago turns and looks at me in surprise.
‘What are you doin’ here?’
‘I’m just here. This is where I am.’
‘Well let me tell you sumpin. If it crawls on its belly, walks or flies, I’ll shoot the sumbitch.’
‘That so?’
‘Yeah. Love to hunt.’
‘Okay. Good …’
Mike launches into a long story about a Rottweiler and a man named Fluff—pronounced Flurrff. Fluff had a beard, though I can’t remember why this was relevant, and didn’t believe the dog was as tough as everyone said it was. One night in a bar, he bought it a beer and started tormenting it.
‘He kep lookin’ between its legs an’ slappin’ it in the balls. Shee-it! That dawg, as true as I tell ya, that dawg jes kep lookin’ over his shoulder like “Whas this guy doin’?” An’ everyone was tellin’ Flurff to lay offa that dawg, but he jes kep on with “This ain’t no tough dawg” and slappin’ its balls ‘round, an’ all of a
sudden, as God is my witness, that dawg turn and done sunk his teeth into Flurff’s leg an’ we couldn’t pull him off. Sumbitch took it over the head with bottles an’ God knows what else … wouldn’t let go. Somebody ran out an’ grab a two by four an’ started whackin’ it over the head. Sheee-it! Flurff? Eighteen stitches in the leg—the Lord knows I’m tellin’ the truth.’
Everyone shakes their head and laughs. There’s a few moments of nostalgic silence, then: ‘If there’s one thing I’m proud of in my life,’ says Emerson, as the laughter dies down, ‘it’s what I did today. I was pallbearer at a funeral and the grass was so slick I thought we was all gonna go over. I was on the back like a brake.’
Everyone falls silent. Fluff is forgotten. Emerson stares at his beer. ‘Federal laws,’ he says, sadly. ‘You can’t bury no one on their motorcycle no more.’
‘He had a bike?’ someone asks.
‘He did not,’ says Emerson.
No one says anything for a while and then another redneck stumbles over and shows me a straight-edge razor he just bought. It’s old and rusty but still sharp.
‘That’s a beautiful straight-edge,’ I say, gauging the distance between myself and the door. There’s no logic in here. Subjects rise up out of nowhere and disappear halfway through. I never heard so many suicide stories. The best is about a man who shot himself under the chin, blew the top of his head off—and lived.
‘Now he’s bald on top ’cause they grafted some of his back onto the top thar.’
‘That’s amazing,’ I say.
‘What’s amazing?’ asks Mike, who was telling the story.
‘Well, you know, that he blew the top of his head off and lived.’
‘I’ll tell you what’s amazing,’ says Mike, eyeing me narrowly. ‘That evolution bullshit. That’s what’s amazin’. You don’t believe that evolution bullshit do you?’
‘Yes, I do, you hillbilly, redneck moron, and furthermore my great-great-grandfather was Charles Darwin,’ is what I feel like
saying. Instead I shift from one foot to the other and in a low, cowardly voice say, ‘Well, you know …’
‘You
do
,’ he says, grinning ominously. ‘You believe that sheeit!’
‘Well, there does seem to be some evidence.’
‘Yeah? So how come I ain’t never seen no monkeys around here? I ain’t seen no monkeys around here, have you?’
‘No.’
He moves closer.
‘No, I haven’t.’
‘Okay, then let me ask you sumpin else. If we came from monkeys how come there’s hundreds of monkeys in the world an’ you don’t never see no man come outta one of ‘em?’
How to begin to answer?
‘Let me buy you a drink,’ I suggest.
‘Bull-sheeeit! Tha’s what evolution is. Bull-
sheeit,
’ he insists, grinning at me furiously. ‘You believe in that sheeit?’
Am I going to be forced on my knees to admit to a literal interpretation of the Bible? Is Fluff to be called to work his magic on my testes? I realise that I’m profoundly and strangely drunk. I skid my eyes toward the barmaid, who, mercifully, claps her hands together and says it’s time to close. Everyone deflates. Emerson revives the snoring man. He looks around, bemused. He has a pleasant, flat face with almond eyes that won’t focus.
I bid a swift goodnight and hurry along the wall back to my room, clutching my jar of moonshine.
Stumped
Having been ejected from boarding school at the age of fourteen, I moved back home to the mill house. By then my mother’s drinking was persistent and depressing. She still cooked well, but it was accompanied by the frequent hiss of uncorking cider. I began to drink with her on occasion.
It took me less than a year to get thrown out of the next school, a small secondary modern in a nearby village. I have few memories of the place. It was ugly, it was school. I don’t even remember why I was expelled, but when I asked my father if he could remember, he thought for a moment and then said, ‘I think it had something to do with a bus.’ And I think he was right. I remember an altercation of some kind and the face of a startled middle-aged woman with permed hair and pointed glasses, but that is all. The vivid memories I do have of that year, as you will probably have come to expect by now, are of a sexual nature.
But I won’t go into them in any detail. Suffice to say, the school ‘slut,’ so named for wanting what everyone else wanted and getting it with honesty and enthusiasm, became pregnant after an encounter with me in a haystack. She was the daughter of a lorry driver and not a great beauty above the collarbone.
An abortion was clearly indicated, but I visualised my father’s strained but polite face as he looked from me to the girl and back again while I explained my urgent need for money. Nor was it hard to imagine, once the excruciating encounter was over, the scathing comments from my mother, as soon as the necessary libation had been uncorked and consumed.
I sent away for a book, available through
Exchange & Mart
,
which listed merchant ships in need of crew. Ever the hero, I had decided to bolt.
Figuring the girl was pregnant anyway, I had her as often as I could. I told her I was working on an abortion plan and daily checked the mail for news of ships leaving out of Southampton. Whether my ever more vigorous (desperate) lovemaking brought on an early miscarriage, or if it was a hysterical pregnancy in the first place, I do not know, but one morning I arrived at school to be told that all was well again. I gave up plans for a life in the Merchant Marine and set about destroying the last remnants of an education.
Whatever caused me to get kicked out must have been relatively serious, because I was already in the educational gutter. To get washed into the drain took some doing. In my case, the case of a spoiled middle-class boy, the drain came in the form of the Università Per Stranieri, an exotically named language school operated out of a cubic palazzo, the Palazzo Galenga, in Perugia, Italy.
My parents had given up. In less than a year I could go to work. Here was a place to tread water.
The school was attended largely by young Americans and English either in between school and university or, in the case of some females, as an alternative to the more expensive European finishing schools.
At first I lived with a family, an old couple who had a beautiful twenty-three-year-old daughter. About a month after I was there I discovered a small circular shaft connecting my room and the bathroom next door. It was an empty pipe through which a speaking tube had once passed. On either side of the thin wall were two metal caps, retained in a bracket by a single twist. There was even a handle on each cap to help you get it off. I removed the one in the bathroom, hid it, and placed some items around the hole to distract attention but not to obstruct my view of the bath. I went to my room and ran a test. With the cap on my side removed, a two-inch-diameter cylinder provided an excellent view of the bathroom and in particular, the bath.
It was still light when I heard the daughter go in to take her bath before going out for the evening. I slowly unscrewed my cap, slid it down the wall a few millimetres and, through a wary crescent, watched as she undressed. As the crescent was so small, I assimilated her in sections, but, as I put the pieces together, it seemed she had the body of Italy itself, timeless and classic, the form of a statue in the Uffizi: a long slender neck, sloping shoulders, small breasts, a high waist swelling to broad hips whose sweeping outer line had all the elegance of a swan. She was so beautiful I began to sweat. I wanted to see more, wanted to see her whole. She stepped into the bath. I lowered the cap and pressed my eye closer.
I felt the cap sliding from my fingers.
I fumbled for it. It scraped against the wall and fell. The daughter’s head snapped toward me. Her elbows flew toward each other across her breasts. I had drawn the drapes in my room, but they were thin. If I removed my eye from the hole, light would shine through from my side and make the hole glaringly visible on hers. However, if I kept my eye in place, light from
her
side might be powerful enough to penetrate the tube and illuminate my terrified eyeball at the other end.
She stared at the hole, unmoving, intent. I stared back. The expression on her face could have been one of uncertainty or ‘I see you back there, you filthy little
testa di cazzo,
and I’m going to stare at you until you take your eye away from that hole and cap it.’
Thirty seconds passed like this. I was afraid to blink. Her stillness, the intensity of her expression, her attitude of outraged modesty was a magnificent rebuke,
if
she could see me; but I still wasn’t sure. Finally, out of courtesy to her, if indeed she was seeing me, I looked away to study another part of the bathroom. The movement of my eyeball must have sent a reflection back down the tube because it was at this point that she began to scream.
I capped the hole and went out for the evening.
In the morning, the hole was glued shut and the atmosphere
was chilly. The daughter had left for work already. The parents moved about, their heads bowed, their eyes never meeting mine.
That day, before they could write a letter to my parents, I met an Italian student who was looking for someone with whom to share an apartment. I called my parents and conned them into paying my half. The Italian was almost never there, he had a girlfriend he stayed with most nights, so at the age of fifteen I essentially had my own place. It had a large kitchen at the back and two bedrooms at the front divided from each other by a wood partition which stopped a few feet short of the ceiling so that both rooms could benefit from the single fan swaying on its stalk above.
I settled in to enjoy the remaining months of my education.
Perugia was a town perched on a series of hills overlooking the Umbrian Valley. In one form or another it had been there since at least 300 B.C. Once you had climbed up its winding streets you reached a plateau. The main street ran from a cathedral at one end to a small park with views of the valley at the other. In the evening, for an hour or two before dinner, the inhabitants of the city and the many students (there was also an Italian university in the town) promenaded up and down this street, stopping now and then for coffee or a drink at one of several outdoor cafés. It was, for younger people, an extended flirtation conducted by the play of eyes, the torment of feigned indifference and the relief of an over-the-shoulder glance, a one-second flash of teeth, dark eyes fixing on you, and then the hair again. And on she walks, her final message of solace and encouragement sent by the sway of her large hips.
I learned enough Italian to get by and then started to travel the country. It was hard to hitch out of Perugia because the roads that came down off it, like veins from the pupil of an eyeball, had no final intent. Only when you reached the base could you find the road that led to the highways. To walk down off the hill was exhausting so I took to stealing scooters, which I would ride out of town until they ran out of gas. I would then hitch wherever the mood took me. I started with small trips, to Florence and
Rome, both of which were only a hundred or so miles away, but eventually I hitched the country from one end to the other, up to Venice in the north and down to Naples and Sicily in the south. Often I went alone, sometimes with friends, once with two English girls. I drank wine until I vomited and hitched until I fell asleep. I saw hills sparkling with fireflies and skies alive with shooting stars. I woke with the smell of Italy in my nostrils, farm land, eucalyptus, wild rosemary, heat.
It was one of the most vivid periods of my life; but it was also hard. I was younger than the other students, fifteen to their eighteen to twenty. The women were old enough to be intimidating, but not experienced or confident enough to want a boy lover.
I only slept with three and three-quarter women.
One was a striking American, one was English, and one was a beautiful French girl. The last was a woman from Australia whom I met in the final week of my stay.
She was pretty, if a little overweight, and I remember thinking as I sat drinking with her in a bar, how kind she seemed. We came back to my place and it was only when I had her on the edge of the bed and pulled up her skirt that I noticed one of her legs was an odd shade of pink and had a hinge in it.
‘Is it going to bother you?’ she asked, looking at me with a hopeful but slightly ashamed expression, as if she should have told me before we came up the stairs.
‘Not at all,’ I replied gallantly, partly out of politeness, partly out of genuine compassion, and partly—well, she was willing and I was fifteen and one leg more or less was both literally and figuratively beside the point. She unstrapped the limb and slid it off the stump. It was a plastic limb and made a skittering noise as it hit the wooden floor.
On I jumped and was, I’m sure, as clumsy as usual, with less to cling to, more so. However, she at least was grateful if not satisfied and afterwards we lay for a long time in each other’s arms, two incomplete people staring at the ceiling.
I had the fear.
Not fear in the specific—not a moment of explicable fear—
but a malaise as physical as mental, a constant unease, fear like that vast fungus which extends for miles underground.
By way of illustration:
Carlo was a student at the regular university, one of those demented Italian intellectuals, intense and fanatical one minute, full of seductive bonhomie the next, Communist one month, anarchist the next. He had a twitchy, defensive charm that went well with his lank dark hair and black beard. People found him odd, but they liked him.
One day, Carlo did not turn up for class. For several days, none of his fellow students saw him. No one knew where he was. Before
passeggio,
as the evening walk was called, students gathered on the broad steps of the cathedral. Sometimes there would be a couple of hundred divided into groups, discussing the potential of the oncoming night. One evening, a week after Carlo’s disappearance, a friend of his, Guiseppe, came up the steps toward us. He was accompanied by a young man. Both looked sombre. Guiseppe informed us that Carlo was dead. He had been killed by a car while riding his motorcycle home to visit his mother. The young man, a friend of Carlo’s from his hometown, had brought the news. We were shocked and sad. For all his intensity, there was, thinking of him in retrospect, something frail and vulnerable about Carlo. He had the quality of a neglected child, impudent not out of arrogance but out of necessity.
For the next few days Guiseppe and his friend were often around. The friend was clean-shaven and always wore a beret and dark glasses. When you spoke to him, he smiled and shrugged but rarely said anything. Sometimes when we talked about Carlo, it was with affection, at other times with humour.
After a week or so we stopped talking about him and a few days after that the clean-shaven young man came up the steps of the cathedral and removed his dark glasses and beret.
It was Carlo.
The whole thing, he told us, had been an ‘intellectual exercise.’ He wanted to witness the effect of his own death, wanted, as it were, to attend his own funeral. It was amusing, nothing more.
I did not believe this. I believed his purpose was to assess his value in the world, to see if he could see himself reflected in the mirror of our grief. He needed his funeral eulogy in advance when it could still do him some good.
I could have used an affirmation of some kind myself, something to repudiate my growing conviction that I was, and always would be, completely insignificant. I looked at the future and saw no place for myself out there. I was middle class but had, by rejecting education, closed the doors which would otherwise have led to opportunity and contact with my own. I had fewer qualifications than the average factory apprentice, but unlike him was denied the fellowship of the working class.
As the time approached for my return to England, to return a man ready for work, my nerve was failing me. I travelled the country alone, often through areas infested with rural Mafia, and, . in spite of often blistering reviews, continued my attempts at coital adequacy, but for all this, and all my public display of arrogance and bravado, when I was alone, I could no longer hide from myself this great unease. I was a prisoner who had struggled for ten years to escape. Free at last, I found myself bewildered, an agoraphobic awash in space: how could I know which way to run when there was no wall to bash my head against?
I lay there with my incomplete antipodean, thinking about these last six months and the ten-year war preceding it. In most respects I’d won. For someone my age—never mind a descendant of Charles Darwin—I was staggeringly ignorant. I couldn’t spell or do long division, and if you asked me if Vladivostok was the capital of Poland or a Russian poet, I’d be completely, well … stumped.
BOOK: Trials of the Monkey
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